grow away

2006
korean egg tempera, permanent marker & gel ink on bristol board
19" x 24"

i painted this at a rather bitter time in my life; my sister and i weren't speaking to our parents and i had a lot of pent-up anger that needed to be released. i meant this painting to be a follow-up to "you can't swim out of your gene pool", which is like, you can't choose your family and you can't escape 'em, but you can dare to be different if you want to, and it's okay to break the mold if you have to. i firmly believe i'll marry a non-korean guy, for example. bloodlines will get muddled. but that's fantastic! i think everyone's gonna be the same race someday.

but yeah, the message is pretty self-explanatory. i wanted my parents to let me live my life the way i wanted to (i.e., get tattoos and not feel bad about them, especially when the one they're mad about is about family and roots). and now they do, which is nice.